What Motivates School Shootings?

Jaylen Fryberg

“I needed to do this,” Jaylen Fryberg wrote in 2014 in his final text message to his family.Moments later, he would walk into his Marysville, Washington, school, kill four of his classmates, and commit suicide.He asked his family to apologize to his friends’ parents for what he was about to do, saying he needed his “crew” to come with him. “I needed [my] ride or dies with me on the other side.”A breakup set him off. Days before the massacre, Fryberg’s girlfriend broke up with him. In retaliation, he started bombarding her with texts promising he’d kill himself and trying to blame her for it. “Don’t bother coming to my funeral,” Fryberg texted her. “I set the date. Hopefully you regret not talking to me.”In his final message, he told his parents that he loved them but that he “wasn’t happy.” To him, his massacre was nothing more than a trip to the other side of existence. He just wanted to make sure his friends were there with him. He murdered four people and injured one more purely because, in his words, “I didn’t want to go alone.”